RoR: Forum

Thanks, Eric. Religious zealots frustrate the hell out me but I always want to remember how difficult it was to come to my own position. Arguing will get you nowhere. All that can be done is to state your position, to give your reasons, and to live a good life by it.

Boring old Epistemology is the key to any religious question.

Post 21

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 12:51am

Hooo, Nicki and Marnee on the same thread. JJ and Summer jump on board and I'm declaring this "sexiest SOLO thread evar."

Wonderful article, Eric, I enjoyed reading it very much. I was lucky to grow up in a secular family, but I absorbed many elements of Original Sin via cultural osmosis. Your writing reminded me how much fun it was to shed those while discovering Ayn Rand. Kudos.

Post 22

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 12:54am

Yes, Andrew - those were indeed "those thrilling days of yesteryear..."...

Post 23

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 1:41am

Really enjoyed the article Eric, and as one who grew up in an Exclusive Brethren family (and the Catholics ain't got nothing on them :) ) I fully empathise with your position.

(I was very lucky my parents had just enough 'rebel' in them to get chucked out - literally - of the Brethren when I was young, although, of course, they never lost all the baggage).

Post 24

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 6:53am

So, my liberal ex-girlfriend was all excited because she found this "really cool" Episcopal church with a young female priest that encouraged her to help with the service prep and she was writing the "prayers of the people".

She was listing all of the proper people to pray for "let us pray for the poor, the hungry, the weak". I jumped in and asked if she would pray for the strong and beautiful.
"Of course not!" she said.
"You tell me that I am strong and beautiful. Why do you want to leave me off of Santa's list?" sez I.
"Because the strong and beautiful don't need our prayers." she said.
To which I predictably reply
"Your goddam right about that."

Bill Sipes

Post 25

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 7:14am

Eric:
Personally I don't see the baby in Mr. Rich Engle's religion bathwater. I see redeeming aspects of certain religious rituals, marriage, the funeral rites, and anything else that is a ritual celebration of a persons life or life itself. But I do not believe that you need to hold onto religion to hold onto these things.

And that is exactly why organized religion isn't for you. It absolutely was never for me, in fact it made me horribly uncomfortable having to go to various services, which I had to do a great deal of between regular life things and the fact that as a musician I often made money doing weddings, receptions, and even funerals (you haven't mentally suffered until you've had to perform "Danny Boy" at an Irish funeral for a friend named Dan who died of AIDS). In my first marriage, it so happened my kids were raised Catholic (one main reason being because of busing, to get them into parochial school). I had to take a class taught by nuns who looked down their nose at me as a "halfway decent secular humanist, and that's not very hard to do". There was one point where, as a parent, I had to sign a contract, which bottom line means you are "signing their souls over to the Catholic Church". Whatever. I told my kids about it when they got older and they just laughed. One is a nursing student at Ursuline College, the other one is still in parochial school, and they both go to the UU church with me whenever they can.

Rituals and life celebrations are good things, generally, if they are done with any intelligence.

I surely would not be involved in a religious community if it weren't for the Unitarian Universalist church, and particularly the church I attend, and the minister they have. That ideology, that minister, and that community work for me in a way I never thought possible. But that's for me, see... :)

(Edited by Rich Engle on 11/01, 7:16am)

Post 26

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 7:19am

Bob Palin-

When I made my First Communion as a child I gagged on the Communion wafer, a sure sign of things to come as I now gag on religion in general

See, that's an omen that was true- watch your mysticism.

I'm glad you got straightened out and turned your life over to Cheeses.

Post 27

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 7:20am

Question here - are rituals intrinsic, or are they a crutch in the developing into an independent being - in other words, is it or would it be detrimental to not have rituals if a fully self-responsible rationally self-interested person?

Post 28

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 7:29am

Robert-

Big topic. How's this for a start- I don't think hardly a single person gets through a day without performing some kind of ritual. Ritual behavior is deeply ingrained behavior. The questions become: why are they so very important as to be performed so regularly, and what do they satisfy for humans?

Marnee: Happy Halloween

I'm so sick of these politically correct a-holes destroying Halloween fun. We do it different over at the UU church- last Sunday we brought in all the kids in their costumes, the minister told them a story about the mythical origins of the jack-o-lantern, and then we had them do an extra trick-or-treat run through the congregation to collect some cash for UNICEF.

Sometimes, we let the pagans take over for awhile. You can see why the local fundamentalists aren't real fond of us- we share the altar:

Post 29

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 9:07am

Bill Sipes,

About Post 24, LOLOLOLOLOL...

Amen.

Michael

Post 30

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 11:07am

I quite agree with you Rich -

Ritual behavior is deeply ingrained behavior. The questions become: why are they so very important as to be performed so regularly, and what do they satisfy for humans?

Taking it in context, one could say it is an aspect of the developing of a human amidst the tribalistic world, when virtually all were - by today's standards - immature beings, very dependent on others for their survival... in a world of immense complexity, with a view of immense simplicity, there was bound to be means of great uncertainty - which, in terms at least of conformity and unity, rituals provided the means of group cohesance, giving patterning where for many none existed, or existed on such a large scale [as in seasonal changes] that it would oft seem as if perhaps more chance than proscribed change...

Post 31

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 11:22am

I keep bumping into more and more personal rituals as I observe myself. These are not habits, they are rituals- they seem to be essential on some level or another. Grooming and dressing rituals are interesting to observe. I also like watching the little dance that goes on when small groups of business folk from different factions sit down to meet for the first time. I think you're onto something- even the small rituals seem to have something to do with creating order, control, and focusing.

Post 32

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 12:01pm

The book The Power of Full Engagement confirms the human need for ritual, arguing that a person's ability to use will alone to accomplish self-care has severe limits. Experiments such as tempting dieters with food under various levels of duress show that this diffused focus can disrupt even the best intentions. Properly reasoned rituals definitely help us to maximize the effectivness of the will. Even Leonard Peikoff argues in OPAR that such automation of our mental processes frees us to focus on mastering higher-level skills.

Post 33

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - 11:48pm

Didn't Joseph Campbell write something about the importance of rituals and suggest that the lack of common rituals is leaving contemporary kids/young people at a spiritual loss?

It's been awhile since I've looked at that and I'm away from my books, so I can't quite recall.

Post 34

Wednesday, November 2, 2005 - 6:49am

If rituals are used in place of integrated contextualness - you be correct, and thus it is with much of today's youth, having little foundation on which to build a coherent sense of life.... hence the rituals in prior times... but it need not now be that way, since human knowledge has grown much more than just rituals for gaining a sense of order... [consider the philosophy of Objectivism, for instance]...
(Edited by robert malcom on 11/02, 6:50am)

Post 35

Wednesday, November 2, 2005 - 9:42am

Thanks, Eric. Thanks to all who have shared their thoughts and experiences on this thread.

Friedrich Nietzsche exaggerated the importance of the death of (belief in) God, but it is important. Fritz was too optimistic about how soon God would be fully dead, but it's coming along. A contemporary of his, Marie-Jean Guyau, wrote a good book called The Non-Religion of the Future. If I recall correctly, Comte and Feurerbach, earlier in that century, also wrote concerning the social and personal issues that have been raised in this thread.

I'm 57 years old. I converted from Christian to atheist when I was 18. That was somewhat before I discovered Rand. The word conversion is really the right word for what happened. It occurred in just a few minutes of solitary thought. I simply dared to envision what the world would be like if it existed by itself, without there being God. Then there came a gestalt shift: the world was just fine, it was possible, it was actual, and it didn't need God for it to exist.

I felt so clean, like Rand's character Cheryl in her epiphany. That was the reward of leaving faith for reason. It was the joy of total intellectual honesty and the exhilaration of freed thought.

The world was beautiful. The loss of God was like the death of a loved one. There had always been so much saying in religion that God loves you. I realized now how much I had loved God. I felt the most enormous compassion for all of mankind. I think that was at least partly because now they had no one watching over them.

For a little while, I continued to subscribe to the idea that helping others had the highest moral significance. That was something I had only begun to question when first I read Rand's new ethical theory and vision.

I don't think I had ever really believed in Original Sin in my religious years. It was part of our family's religious doctrine, I professed it, but I don't think I ever really applied it to myself. I have always liked what Rand had to say about that doctrine in her speech for Galt.

The topic of rituals has been mentioned. I have a couple. They are solitary. One is at the grave of my first lover Jerry. That is at sunrise each year on the day of his death. The other ritual is a concerto I play when I have completed a long-struggle creation.

Affection for you all,
Stephen

Post 36

Wednesday, November 2, 2005 - 10:47pm

In The Claremont Review of Books the reviewer Andrew Klavan tries to do a job on Sam Harris's The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. It's a review that tries to be erudite but comes off as pedantic, instead. It doesn't manage to grasp Harris's mostly epistemological indictment of all faiths, nor his position that it is phony to be tolerant of a religious belief when one doesn't share it and thinks it is false. (Problem is, most people think tolerating someone who is religious means tolerating religion, treating it with some measure of respect, whereas it means only that one recognizes another's right to wrongfully worship.) It would be fun seeing some of you folks go after this review. (I am not sure but it may be available on line at www.claremont.org. Editor can be emailed at crbedit@claremont.org.)

Post 37

Thursday, November 3, 2005 - 2:03am

Robert,

Thanks for your response. I had a chance to look over some of the material to which I referred and had a similar reaction--I can see where it was once quite important, but I'm not sure it HAS to be that way today. I'll have to think more about this.

Tenya

Post 38

Thursday, November 3, 2005 - 8:16am

(Problem is, most people think tolerating someone who is religious means tolerating religion, treating it with some measure of respect, whereas it means only that one recognizes another's right to wrongfully worship.)

Glad you got that all straight for us, Tibor.

Post 39

Thursday, November 3, 2005 - 8:58am